UMKC Enhances Business School Model

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The $32 million Henry W. Bloch Executive Hall for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, part of the Henry W. Bloch School of Management, will open this fall on the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) campus to serve undergraduate and graduate business students.

Designed by Kansas City-headquartered BNIM, the building sets a new standard for business schools. It is chock full of active learning classrooms, such as a trading floor to imitate real-time market transactions, a design lab for students to test business ideas and a behavioral science lab that allows students to conduct experiments on consumer behavior. A 200-seat auditorium, tiered amphitheater and 16-screen video wall are also included, featuring an Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame that will highlight students’ success stories.

“It’s about creating tools or learning spaces that are adaptable, flexible and can be used in many different ways,” said Steve McDowell, principal of BNIM. “[The business school’s] Dean Teng-kee Tan believes heavily in role playing by the students so they get involved in not only having an idea, but being comfortable demonstrating how that idea can be brought to the marketplace and make people’s lives better. It’s a much different style of business school learning. The current tradition is that much of the education is looking at cases that have been studied over and over again. This is creating new cases and new processes over and over again and really relying on the creativity and knowledge of the students to do that.”

The 58,000-square-foot building is exactly square, but the interior incorporates curvature that allows people to have views of other people, floors and spaces. The inspiration came from Dean Tan, who told the design team early on: “The path of innovation is never a straight line.”

That quote became the design team’s mantra, McDowell said, and they created a path that extended through the building all the way to the garden on the south and to the student union on the north. “We used twists and turns to capture light and bring light into the building,” he said. “We got a really interesting day lit space and used, in a way, all of the circulation and leftover space and were able to pull that together and create much more effective collaboration zones especially for serendipitous interactions.”

The building was built in between the student union and the existing Bloch school, mimicking the layout of a typical central quad that is easy to pass through and very transparent. Designed to meet LEED Gold certification standards, the building features not only natural light, but also a unique exterior. To match the other brick buildings on campus, the building’s exterior is made up of an inexpensive precast system cladded with terra cotta that “added a tinted elegance and texture that seemed to fit with the building,” McDowell said.

Plus, the building has a high-performance thermal wall and heavy caste frame that helps regulate the temperature of the building and allows mechanical systems to operate at a lower demand level.

The business school was modeled after the one at Stanford University in California, which McDowell said is now about eight to 10 years old. “We thought there were going to be a lot more examples, but there was a lot less of that than we had hoped for. Since we didn’t find a lot of models in the business world, we looked at some cases in business, such as design firm IDEO, and at architecture schools. It really came down to creating a new model more than relying on other people. Stanford was innovative within restrictions of the building, cost and time frame. Hopefully, we’ve take it to the next level beyond that,” McDowell said.

The Bloch School ranks No. 1 in the world for innovation management research by the Journal of Product Innovation Management and was rated 2012’s National Model Graduate Entrepreneurship Program by the U.S. Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Princeton Review ranks the school’s graduate and undergraduate entrepreneurship among the top 20 in the nation.